“Togs 8 suits, many hats I wear,” the Ripper wrote in an eighty-one-line poem he sent the “Superintendent of Great Scotland Yard” on November 8th a year later. “The man is keen: quick, and leaves no trace—” His objective is to “destroy the filthy hideous whores of the night; Dejected, lost, cast down, ragged, and thin, Frequenters of Theatres, Music-halls and drinkers of Hellish gin.”
For Walter Sickert, it would have been another big “ha ha” to head back to the scene of Elizabeth Stride’s murder and ask a constable what was going on. In the same poem of 1889, the Ripper boasts, “I spoke to a policeman who saw the sight, And informed me it was done by a Knacker in the night . . . . I told the man you should try and catch him; Say another word old Chap I’ll run you in.
“One night hard gone I did a policeman meet—Treated and walked with him down High St.”
The 1889 poem was “filed with the others.” No significant attention was paid to the distinctive form of printing or the relatively clever rhymes, which were not those of an illiterate or deranged person. The reference to theaters and music halls as places where the Ripper spots “whores” should have been a clue. Perhaps an undercover man or two should have begun frequenting such places. Sickert spent many of his nights at theaters and music halls. Lunatics and impoverished butchers and East End ruffians probably did not.
In the 1889 poem, the Ripper admits he reads the “papers” and takes great exception to being called “insane.” He says, “I always do my work alone,” contradicting the much-publicized theory that the Ripper might have an accomplice. He claims he doesn’t “smoke, swill, or touch gin.” “Swill” was street slang for excessive drinking, which Sickert certainly did not do at this stage in his life. If he drank at all, he wasn’t likely to touch rotgut gin. He did not smoke cigarettes, although he was fond of cigars and became rather much addicted to them in later years.
“Altho, self taught,” the Ripper says, “I can write and spell.”
The poem is difficult to decipher in places, and “Knacker” might be used twice or might be “Knocker” in one of the lines. “Knacker” was street slang for a horse slaughterer. “Knocker” was street slang for finely or showily dressed. Sickert was no horse slaughterer, but the police publicly theorized that the Ripper might be one.
Sickert’s greatest gift was not poetry, but this did not deter him from jotting a rhyme or two in letters or singing silly, original lyrics he set to music-hall tunes. “I have composed a poem to Ethel,” he wrote in later years when his friend Ethel Sands was volunteering for the Red Cross:With your syringe on your shoulder
And your thermometer by your side
You’ll be curing some young officer
And making him your pride
In another letter, he jots a verse about the “incessant sopping drizzle” in Normandy:It can’t go on for ever
It would if it could
But there is no use talking
For it couldn’t if it would
In a Ripper letter sent in October 1896 to the Commercial Street Police Station in Whitechapel, he mocks the police by quoting, “‘The Jewes are people that are blamed for nothing’ Ha Ha have you heard this before.” The spelling of “Jews” was hotly debated during Catherine Eddows’s inquest, and the coroner repeatedly questioned police whether the word on the wall was “Juwes” or “Jewes.” Even though the Ripper was supposed to be dead by 1896—according to Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten—the letter of 1896 concerned the police enough to result in a flurry of memorandums:
“I beg to submit attached letter received per post 14th inst. Signed Jack the Ripper stating that writer has just returned from abroad and means to go on again when he gets the chance,” Supervisor George Payne wrote in his special report from the Commercial Street station. “The letter appears similar to those received by police during the series of murders in the district in 1888 and 1889. Police have been instructed to keep a sharp lookout.”
A telegram was sent to all divisions, asking police to keep this “sharp look out, but at the same time to keep the information quiet. Writer in sending the letter no doubt considers it a great joke at the expense of the police.” On October 18, 1896, a chief inspector wrote in a Central Officer’s Special Report that he had compared the recent letter with old Jack the Ripper letters and “failed to find any similarity of handwriting in any of them, with the exception of the two well remembered communications which were sent to the ‘Central News’ Office; one a letter, dated 25th Sept./88 and the other a postcard, bearing the postmark 1st Oct./88.”
What is so blatantly inconsistent in the chief inspector’s report is that he first says there are no similarities between the recent letter and the earlier Ripper letters, but then he goes on to cite similarities: “I find many similarities in the formation of letters. For instance the y’s, t’s and w’s are very much the same. Then there are several words which appear in both documents.” But in conclusion, the chief inspector decides, “I beg to observe that I do not attach any importance to this communication.” CID Superintendent Donald Swanson agreed. “In my opinion,” he jotted at the end of the inspector’s report, “the handwritings are not the same . . . . I beg that the letter may be put with other similar letters. Its circulation is to be regretted.”
The letter of 1896 was given no credibility by police and was not published in the newspapers. The Ripper was banished, exorcised. He no longer existed. Maybe he never had existed, but was just some fiend who killed a few prostitutes, and all of those letters were from crackpots. Ironically, Jack the Ripper became a “Mr. Nobody” again, at least to the police, for whom it was most convenient to live in denial.
It has often been asked—and I expect the question will always be asked—if Sickert committed other murders in addition to the ones believed to have been committed by Jack the Ripper. Serial killers don’t suddenly start and stop. The Ripper was no exception, and as is true of other serial killers, he did not restrict his murders to one location, especially a heavily patrolled area where thousands of anxious citizens were looking for him. It would have been incredibly risky to write letters laying claim to every murder he committed, and I don’t think the Ripper did. Sickert thrived on the publicity, on the game. But first and foremost was his need to kill and not be caught.
Eleven months after the Ripper letter of 1896, twenty-year-old Emma Johnson disappeared on the early evening of Wednesday, September 15th, while walking home near Windsor, about twenty miles west of London. The next day, two women picking blackberries close to Maidenhead Road discovered two muddy petticoats, a bloody chemise, and a black coat in a ditch under shrubbery.
On Friday, September 17th, the Berkshire police were notified of Emma’s disappearance and organized a search. The clothing was identified as Emma’s, and Sunday, in the same field where the women had been picking berries, a laborer found a skirt, a bodice, a collar, and a pair of cuffs in a ditch. On the banks of a stagnant inlet of the Thames, Emma’s mother discovered a pair of her daughter’s stays. Near these were the imprint of a woman’s boot and scrape marks in the dirt apparently made by someone dragging a heavy object toward the murky inlet.
Police dragged the stagnant water, and fifteen feet offshore a muddy, slimy, naked body emerged. It was identified by the Johnsons as their daughter. A doctor examined Emma’s body at the family home, and it was his conclusion that she was grabbed by the right arm and received a blow to the head to render her insensible before the killer cut her throat. At some point, her clothing was removed. Then the killer dragged her body to the inlet and shoved or threw it into the water. Maidenhead Road was a well-known spot for romantic couples to frequent at night.
There was no suspect and the murder was never solved. There is no evidence it was committed by Walter Sickert. I do not know where he was in September 1897, although he was not with Ellen. The couple had separated the year before and were still friendly and occasionally traveled together, but Ellen was in France when Emma Johnson was mur
dered and had not been in Sickert’s company for months. Eighteen ninety-seven was a particularly stressful year for Sickert. An article he had written for the Saturday Review the previous year had precipitated artist Joseph Pennell’s suing him for libel.
Sickert had publicly and foolishly claimed that Pennell’s prints made by transfer lithography were not true lithography. Whistler used the same lithographic process—as did Sickert—and the Master appeared as a witness in Pennell’s case. In an October 1896 letter to Ellen from her sister Janie, Whistler was quoted as saying that he believed Sickert’s arrow was really aimed at him, not Pennell. Sickert had a “treacherous side to his character,” Whistler told Janie. “Walter will do anything, throw anyone over for the object of the moment.” Sickert lost the lawsuit, but perhaps the greater sting had already come—when Whistler testified from the witness stand that his former pupil was an unimportant and irresponsible man.
In 1897, Sickert’s relationship with Whistler finally came to an end. Sickert was poor. He was publicly humiliated. His marriage was ending. He had resigned from the New English Art Club. The fall seemed to be a prime time for the Ripper’s crimes. It was the time of year when five-year-old Sickert endured his terrible surgery in London. Mid-September was when Ellen decided she wanted a divorce, and it was also the time of year when Sickert usually returned to London from his beloved Dieppe.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
BARREN FIELDS AND SLAG-HEAPS
At the mortuary on Golden Lane, Catherine Eddows’s naked body was hung up by a nail on the wall, rather much like a painting.
One by one the male jurors and the coroner, Samuel Frederick Langham, Esquire, filed in to look at her. John Kelly and Catherine’s sister had to look at her, too. On October 4, 1888, the jurors returned what was becoming a familiar verdict to the press and the public: “Wilful murder by some person unknown.” The public outcry was broaching hysteria. Two women had been slaughtered within an hour of each other, and the police still had no clue.
Letters from the public warned that “the condition of the lowest classes is most fraught with danger to all other classes.” Londoners in better neighborhoods were beginning to fear for their lives. Perhaps they ought to raise a fund for the poor to “offer them a chance to forsake their evil lives.” An “agency” should be formed. Letters to The Times suggested that if the upper class could clean up the lower class, there would be no more of this violence.
Overpopulation and the class system, few people seemed to realize, created problems that could not be remedied by tearing down slums or forming “agencies.” The advocacy of birth control was considered blasphemous, and certain types of people were trash and would always be trash. Social problems certainly existed. But London’s class problems were not why prostitutes were dying at the Ripper’s hands. Psychopathic murder is not a social disease. People who lived in the East End knew that, even if they didn’t know the word “psychopath.” The streets of the East End were deserted at night, and scores of plainclothes detectives lurked in the shadows, waiting for the first suspicious male to appear, their disguises and demeanor fooling no one. Some police began wearing rubber-soled boots. So did reporters. It was a wonder people didn’t terrify each other as they quietly crossed paths in the dark, waiting for the Ripper.
No one knew he had committed yet another murder—this one weeks earlier and never really attributed to him. On Tuesday, October 2nd—two days after the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows—a decomposing female torso was discovered in the foundations of Scotland Yard’s new headquarters, which was under construction on the Embankment near Whitehall.
A severed arm had turned up first on September 11th. No one had gotten very excited about it except a Mrs. Potter, whose feeble-minded seventeen-year-old daughter had been missing since September 8th, the same morning Annie Chapman was murdered. The police had little power of intervention or interest in the cases of missing teenagers, especially the likes of Emma Potter, who had been in and out of workhouses and infirmaries, and was nothing but a nuisance.
Emma’s mother was accustomed to her disappearances and brushes with the law, and was terrified when her daughter took off yet again, and then a dismembered female arm was found as gruesome murders continued in the metropolis. Mrs. Potter’s pleas to the police were rewarded by a benevolent fate when a constable found Emma wandering about, alive and well. But had it not been for the hue and cry her mother made and the news stories that followed, it is possible that not much would have been made of a body part. Reporters began to pay attention. Was it possible that the Whitechapel fiend was up to other horrors? But the police said no. Dismemberment was an entirely different modus operandi, and neither Scotland Yard nor its surgeons were inclined to accept the view that a killer changed his pattern.
The arm had been severed from the shoulder and was tied with string. It was discovered on the foreshore of the Thames near the Grosvenor Railway Bridge in Pimlico, less than four miles southwest of Whitechapel and on the same side of the river. Pimlico was about five miles south of 54 Broadhurst Gardens—a short walk for Sickert. “I went [on] such a walk yesterday about 11 kilom.’s,” he wrote from Dieppe when he was fifty-four years old. Five miles was no distance at all, not even when he was an old man whose disoriented and bizarre wanderings were a constant worry to his third wife and others who looked after him.
Pimlico was barely a mile east of Whistler’s studio on Tite Street, in Chelsea, an area quite familiar to Sickert. Battersea Bridge, which traverses the Thames from Chelsea on the north bank to Battersea on the south, was a few blocks from Whistler’s studio and approximately a mile from where the arm was found. In 1884, Sickert painted Battersea Park, which was visible from Whistler’s studio window. In 1888, Pimlico was a quaint area of neat homes and small gardens where the sewage system was raised lest it overflow into the Thames.
It was laborer Frederick Moore’s sorry luck to be working outside the gates of Deal Wharf, near the railway bridge, when he heard excited voices on the shore of the Thames. The tide was low, and several men were talking loudly as they stared at an object in the mud. Since no one seemed inclined to pick up whatever it was, Moore did. The police carried the arm to Sloane Street, where a Dr. Neville examined it and determined it was the right arm of a female. He suggested that the string tied around it was “in order for it to be carried.” He said the arm had been in the water two or three days and was amputated after death. Had it been cut off while the person was still alive, Dr. Neville wrongly deduced, the muscles would have been more “contracted.”
In the late nineteenth century, the notion persisted that the expression on a dead person’s face indicated pain or fear, as did clenched fists or rigidly bent limbs. It was not understood that the body undergoes a variety of changes after death, resulting in clenched teeth and fists due to rigor mortis. The pugilistic position and broken bones of a burned body can be confused with trauma when they are actually due to the shrinking of tissues and fracturing of bones caused by extreme heat, or “cooking.”
The arm, Dr. Neville went on to say, had been “cleanly severed” from the body with a “sharp weapon.” For a while, the police were inclined to believe the amputated limb was some medical student’s doing. It was a prank, police told journalists, a very bad joke. The finding of the torso in the foundations of the new Scotland Yard building was not considered a joke, but maybe it should have been. While the murder wasn’t funny, if this was the Ripper’s work again, what a huge joke, indeed.
News about this latest development was kept relatively brief. There had been enough bad publicity in August and September, and people were beginning to complain that details printed in the newspapers made matters worse. It was “hurting the work of the police,” one person wrote to The Times. Publicity adds to the “state of panic,” which only helps the killer, someone else wrote.
The police were ignorant and an embarrassment, Londoners began to complain. Scotland Yard could not bring offenders to ju
stice, and in confidential memorandums, police officials worried that “if the perpetrator is not speedily brought to justice, it will not only be humiliating but also an intolerable danger.” The amount of mail sent to Scotland Yard was overwhelming, and Charles Warren published a letter in newspapers “thanking” citizens for their interest and apologizing that he simply did not have time to answer them. One might expect that a great many letters were also written to newspapers, and to sort out crank mail, The Times had a policy that while a person did not have to publish his name and address, the information must be included in the original letter to show good faith.
The policy could not have been an easy one to enforce. The telephone had been patented only twelve years earlier and was not yet a household appliance. I doubt that a member of the newspaper staff got into a hansom or galloped off on a horse to check out the validity of a name and address when the individual wasn’t listed in the local directory, and not everybody was. My scan of hundreds of newspapers printed in 1888 and 1889 revealed that anonymous letters were published but not frequently. Most writers allowed their name, address, and even occupation to be published. But as the Ripper crimes began to pick up momentum, there seemed to be an increase in published letters with no attribution beyond initials or cryptic titles, or in some instances, names that strike me, at any rate, as Dickensian or mocking.
Days after Annie Chapman’s murder, a letter to The Times suggested that the police should check on the whereabouts of all cases of “homicidal mania which may have been discharged as ‘cured.’” The letter was signed, “A Country Doctor.” A letter published September 13th and signed “J.F.S.” stated that the day before, a man had been “robbed at 11:00 A.M. on Hanbury Street” in the East End, and at 5:00 P.M. a seventy-year-old man had been attacked on Chicksand Street, and at 10:00 A.M. that very morning a man ran into a bakery shop and made off with the till. All of this, the anonymous writer said, happened “within 100 yards of each other and midway between the scenes of the last two horrible murders.”